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This website includes a biography, news items, photo galleries, classified lists of CDs, discussion of many Hovhaness symphonies and, for the benefit of music lovers and researchers wanting to learn more about Hovhaness, several interviews appear in which Hovhaness speaks about his composing, life and beliefs. Additionally, there is a listing of selected concerts featuring Hovhaness works and a small selection of video performances.

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As the internet's most visible and comprehensive information resource for composer Alan Hovhaness, we welcome any news stories, concert details and Hovhaness-related questions from researchers, organisations and music lovers alike.

Who Was Alan Hovhaness?
Alan Hovhaness ranks among the most intrepid of musical explorers in 20th century classical music. He was a widely recorded and lauded American composer in the 1950s and 60s, and the recipient of numerous awards. Rather ahead of his time aesthetically, he has, since the 1990s, enjoyed something of a revival on CD and radio, as audiences have 'caught up' with him. Yet there is little scholarly commentary on Hovhaness despite the wealth of radical individuality in some phases of his six decades of creativity. This is somewhat surprising given that during the 1940s and 50s he was firmly entrenched within that maverick group of American composers (others included Henry Cowell, Jonn Cage and Lou Harrison) who spearheaded one of the great shifts in 20th century American music, namely that of looking to non-Western cultures for creative renewal in art music. In addition, Hovhaness spearheaded quasi-aleatoric textural music as early as the 1940s, a technique which became known as 'ad libitum' in the 1960s.

The composer's huge output of around 500-odd works has an inevitable uneveness of quality that is seen in the oeuvre of equally restless creators such as Villa Lobos or Henry Cowell, to name but two. But as Leonard Bernstein remarked in 1960, “Some of Hovhaness's music is very, very good”. Indeed, Hovhaness’s best works stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those of America’s most lauded composers, and many are more original if lesser known. Perhaps this is not surprising given that Hovhaness was an outsider by temperament and choice, his artistic credo impermeable to musical fashion and his aesthetic intent often more in sympathy with the Orient than Occident.

Investigation of Hovhaness’s best music (1944 to c.1970) reveals a unique and thoroughly convincing assimilation of highly disparate traditions coming to the fore and receding over the course of his career (e.g. Renaissance polyphony, South Indian classical music, Japanese Gagaku music, Korean Ah-ak music). Of course, many 20th century composers flirted with such exotica, but in Hovhaness they find perhaps the most seamless alchemy of all because it was more than mere flirtation. It was a musical engagement on an aesthetic as well as technical level.